


okay: three, two, one, let's jam.

by explosivesky



Category: RWBY
Genre: F/F, gays in space!, see you space cowboy....
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:41:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22058725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/explosivesky/pseuds/explosivesky
Summary: Bounty hunting's a tough career to make a living out of - or it has been, until now, when their hauler pulls in the wreckage of an escape pod containing a well-known, high-ranking White Fang member. Blake's got a heavy price on her head, but it's nothing in comparison to the people she could lead them to.Millions of stars out there, Adam used to tell her, and they all belong to someone. Just like you do.Not anymore.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long, eventual schneekos
Comments: 109
Kudos: 509





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> it's been a really long time since i've been inspired enough to write, but today's my fic anniversary along with pugoata, and i promised her i'd get something out. so here you go - the introduction to my loosely-based cowboy bebop au!

“Junk.” 

“What? No!” Ruby hastily shoves Weiss away from the haul they’re inspecting on the loading dock, as if the declaration alone will fling it straight back into space. “It’s clearly from a shipwreck - look at the plating; this was probably part of the hull, and it’s all scratched up--”

“It’s space junk,” Weiss repeats flatly, arms crossed. It’s a debate they have at least twice a week. “None of it is salvageable.” 

“Not true,” Ruby argues, walking around the hulking mass. “It’s Black Truncite. Strong alloy. If we melt it down, we can make a good trade for it. _Or_ I can upgrade the shielding around the engine core, like I’ve wanted to do for _months_ now--”

“And waste resources breaking it into pieces small enough to process? Absolutely not--” 

“Give me an hour--”

“You’re both missing the most important part of this pull,” another voice points out lazily, and the two turn to find Yang hovering in the doorway, where the automatic door is struggling to close around her. She’s resting a hand against the top of the frame, the epitome of aloof despite the threat of being crushed should the proximity mechanism fail; her overalls hang off one shoulder, and the yellow of her cybernetic arm is bright and arresting against her skin.

Weiss narrows her eyes, slight sneer warping her mouth. “I told you to stop doing that,” she says. “Every time we hold the doors, the oxygen regulator--” 

“What’s the most important part?” Ruby interrupts, negating Weiss’s offended outrage. “Weiss, you have _incredibly_ low standards for our ship - rude, considering all the _work_ I put in to upgrading this baby - and Yang fucking with the doors for three seconds won’t wear out anything.” She pauses. “But the noise _is_ annoying, Yang, so knock it off.” 

The sound of the door shutting properly does nothing to relieve Weiss’s oncoming headache; Yang approaches, hands up in surrender. “You’re right,” she directs at Ruby, reaching out to touch the warped metal, and her prosthetic fingers make a strange scraping sound when they connect. “It’s probably part of the hull, it’s damaged, and _we_ found it. Meaning?” 

“A shipwreck,” Ruby says excitedly. 

“A _recent_ shipwreck,” Weiss concludes, the truth dawning on her. “We’re near the old SDC mining belt.” 

“Which was shut down due to intense gravitational fluctuations,” Yang says, arm dropping back to her side. “It’s not safe to navigate.” 

“I’m well aware,” Weiss says boredly, a familiar defense mechanism to remnants of her past, but leans closer as if the wreckage holds the answer. “Why would anyone without the proper modifications even plot a course through here? It doesn’t make sense.” 

Yang’s tone shifts serious. “It doesn’t,” she agrees. “But we aren’t the only haulers that search the old mining belts for scrap. I have a hard time believing anyone would leave this kind of metal floating about if it weren’t new.” 

“We’re bounty hunters,” Ruby corrects, whose attention is clearly divided between the problem and the solution; she’s moved to the workbench against the wall, eyes darting between tools. “This is just a fun side gig.” 

“Semantics,” Yang says, waving her away. She settles her gaze solely on Weiss, and it’s heavy with the weight of unfounded guilt. “Weiss. C’mon. We have to at least _check._ ”

_Survivors_ is the sentiment that hangs between them without being spoken aloud, and despite their less-than-conventional careers, they won’t leave anyone to die. Weiss raises a hand to her temple automatically; the original battle’s been lost - Ruby’s now taking a solarpick to the mass, goggles tight around her eyes, laser carving red lines through the hull’s black surface.

“It’ll be dangerous,” Weiss warns. “It could be an ambush.” 

“Good thing we chase down interstellar criminals for a living,” Ruby says, gloved hands tearing a big chunk of alloy from the wreckage; she nearly falls against its weight, but Yang’s there with a steady grip and an endearing eye-roll.

Two hits in a row; Weiss recognizes when she’s outnumbered, not that it’s a fight she would’ve pushed any further. She sighs, slipping her scroll out of her pocket and touching the picture of a red-headed woman that pops up on her screen. 

_“Yes, Captain?”_

“Pyrrha,” she says, “change of plans. We think there’s been an accident.” 

\--

The _Do Not Engage Pulse Jump_ warnings still flicker ominously along the belt’s edges, barely covering the _Quarry 01ED - Property of the Schnee Dust Company_ signs, faded inside of their magnetic-resistant frames _._ The jagged landscape stretches out in front of them, chunks of once-desirable resources rotating slowly in their orbit - larger asteroids in the distance still show signs of old life, small mining stations set up on their surfaces. But the four of them know better. The only people who frequent the belt now are criminals and haulers looking for valuable scrap, similar to their own mission. ( _Bounty hunters,_ Ruby repeats again, entirely too cheerful.) 

_“Ren?_ ” Pyrrha’s voice comes clear through their scrolls. “ _Flux status?_ ” 

“ _Within normal levels,_ ” he answers back, almost bored. 

“Nothing on the scanner,” Ruby says, looking at her own scroll. “So if anything’s here, it’s cloaked.” 

“No,” Yang says, staring out in front of them, relying on her own vision. “Look. There’s pieces of the ship everywhere - too many. Might’ve been more than one.” 

Hulks of destroyed metal shift in and out of their course, expertly avoided by Pyrrha’s careful navigation; Yang’s right, to the rest of their crew’s dismay - the magnitude of the battle that must’ve occurred is much bigger than they’d judged from their original discovery.

“They’re Schnee ships,” Weiss says suddenly, pressing her fingers against the glass. Shock lingers underneath her voice. “Not the one we found - but these - the white shells--” 

Yang’s immediately sharper, standing on the edge she’s lead them to. “A supply fleet?” she says. “Attacked?” 

_“But making a run through the belt?_ ” Pyrrha points out, reproachful. “ _The only reason they’d come through here is if the cargo they were carrying was illegal._ ” 

“That aligns with my father’s business practices, yes.” Weiss curls her lip in distaste; the warmth from her fingertips creates rings of steam against the window. “Illegal cargo, slave labor, sacrificing the innocent and oppressed--”

“Hold on,” Ruby interrupts the oncoming rant, getting to her feet; there’s a blip lighting on her screen. She curves her fingers over the screen, flips her palm face-up and opens it, scattering the 2-D radar into a 3-D image. “There’s - there’s something - behind the central station. Escape pod. Pyrrha - due one fifty-seven, oh-eight. It isn’t moving. Might’ve been caught trying to escape the crossfire.”

The ship vibrates around them, and they can feel the subtle shift of gravity as Pyrrha steers sharply to the right, following Ruby’s directions. Navigating the belt isn’t simple, even for advanced pilots, but Pyrrha makes it look like some kind of beginner’s obstacle course, one of the drivers’ tests they’d all had to pass for their certifications.

“There.” Yang points to the dark side of an asteroid littered with mining craters, and they all squint, leaning closer--

It’s unmistakable once they’re able to pinpoint its shape: oblong and smooth in the body, several neat thrusters arranged on the bottom - an escape pod whose programmed coordinates clearly went horribly awry, floating in the shadows. It’s impossible to tell if its occupant is alive or dead, but the mere sight of it springs them all into action: Ruby’s programming the ship’s magnetic arm, and Weiss has the cargo bay doors already parting in preparation. Ren and Pyrrha are coordinating over their scrolls - a gravitational flux during this kind of procedure could easily cause more damage to the pod and the person in it, which is why they need to be quick and accurate - and within seconds, they watch as Ruby, piloting the arm, manages to neatly encase the pod and drag it back towards the bay. 

“Slow and steady,” she says to herself, eyes on the arm and not the controls of her scroll. 

“See?” Yang says. “Side gig as haulers really pays off for us sometimes.” 

“ _I think it’s the years of video game practice_ ,” Jaune’s voice cuts through for the first time. 

Ruby flashes a grin. “Probably.” 

The cargo bay doors close, and the three of them watch as the pod is lowered carefully down, arm extending back up and folding in on itself, and a sigh of relief comes from Pyrrha over Ruby’s comm. 

“ _Status_?” Ren asks. 

“New,” Weiss replies quietly. “Definitely new. And damaged. We’ve got to get it open fast - it’s leaking oxygen.” She points to a torn hole near one of the thrusters, and there’s the faint _whoosh_ sound of a broken regulator. 

“Shit,” Yang says. “It’s good that it’s still leaking, but it means we’re running out of time. Weiss - can you override it? Release the lock?”

Weiss presses her fingers around the edges, searching for the emergency command compartment; on the older models, their command screens had been exposed, and thus too easy to both hack and damage. Fatalities had been frequent then. In response, they’d been sealed into the pod’s exterior instead, which made them more secure but much more difficult to find in emergencies. 

Like this one.

It takes a split second - for all Yang knows, that’s all the time the person inside has left - before she says, “Forget it,” and grips the edge of the door in her cybernetic hand. 

“You’ll damage your arm,” Weiss warns her, but steps aside regardless. 

“I’ll repair it,” she answers shortly, and starts to pull, muscles rippling against the resistance.

\--

The noise that startles her into some frame of consciousness is the clean tearing of metal, like snapping hinges. The air that had once tasted thick and stale is now bleeding - that’s the only way she can describe it - healing and warm and pure. She can’t see, only vague outlines and blurry shapes, and the inside of her skull feels as if it’s been vacuumed. 

“Well, well, well,” a distant voice says, a sound Blake’s oxygen-deprived brain only interprets as the color yellow. “Our bounties don’t normally come _to_ us.” 

“Yang, stop,” a different blurry color says commandingly - but it’s bright, like light. “We don’t know what happened or who she is. She almost died. Let’s have some compassion.” 

“I was joking.” 

“You weren’t wrong, though.” The third voice finally forces Blake to blink, eyelids heavy and weighted, and it does almost nothing to correct her vision. “She’s White Fang. This pod is unmistakable.” 

“The other side was my father,” one of them seems to sneer, “so I can’t say I entirely hold it against her.” 

“Let’s give her a minute,” the first voice says, quieting the room. “That much oxygen deprivation is bound to have her scattered.” It’s a woman’s voice - they’re all women’s voices, and though she’s desperate and panicked, she’s unable to produce the adrenaline to fuel it. Women. That makes her safe, a part of her thinks against her will. She wasn’t found by the people she’d abandoned.

By the person. One in particular. That makes her safe.

The yellow comes closer, steps weighted, assured on her feet. There’s orange, now, too, and a shape that might be a smile. “Oh, look at you,” she murmurs, melancholic awe making up the DNA of her tone. She’s sad, but Blake can’t peg the reasons why. 

“Take her out, Yang,” someone orders, and after a minute’s observation, the yellow wraps around her. 

She should fight. She should use every ounce of strength she can muster to push out of this woman’s arms, take the floor instead. Let guns be drawn, let death come. She should run. Back out into the deep breadth of space she’d previously found solace in and let it reclaim her. Millions of stars out there, he used to tell her, and they all belong to someone. Just like you do. 

She doesn’t do either. She sinks into the embrace, fingers curling around skin, and the woman - Yang, apparently - whispers to her again. “Can you stand?” 

Blake blinks again, the world slightly more focused. She’s on a ship, she understands that much, and the colors belong to people. Her feet touch the floor, but Yang doesn’t let her go just yet. The arm around her waist feels cool to the touch, smooth. Not like skin. Like metal. 

“Breathe,” Yang says softly, helping her distribute her weight. “You’ve been basically inhaling poison for god knows how long. Breathe for a moment.” 

“Are you flirting with her already?” the third voice calls, coming into view, and it belongs to a person whose cloak is a familiar, startling shade of red--

It’s that, more than anything, that overrides all other instincts. She shoves Yang away from her with a strength the woman clearly hadn’t thought possible, face an etching of surprise, but Blake overestimates herself, too, stumbles back and into the wall. She doesn’t take her eyes off the red until it focuses. Until it fades. Until it becomes nothing. 

They haven’t drawn guns, she realizes. They’re just watching her strangely, taking inventory of her reactions, her strength, her cognitive awareness. 

“Who are you?” she asks, her own voice rough and gravelly in her throat, roots sprouting through asphalt. 

“We’re the crew of the _Rose_ ,” Yang says, the way you’d explain something to an anxious child, or calm a frightened wild animal. “ _Crescent Rose._ We’re a hauler. I’m Yang, that’s Weiss, and Ruby.” She gestures to each of them in turn, but never takes her eyes off Blake. 

Weiss nods, and Ruby says, “Actually, we’re bounty hunters.” 

“Ruby,” Weiss says, bridge of her nose pinched between her fingers, “in the future, perhaps it’s best you don’t reveal we’re bounty hunters to a target who may actually be on our list.” 

Blake presses flatter against the wall, ears swiveling against her hair. “Bounty hunters?” she hisses, faking anger for show. It doesn’t seem to faze any of them. 

“She _is_ on our list,” Yang says, and crosses her arms in a decisively neutral stance - distant, detached, one of observation and facts. It’s only then Blake realizes how badly the fingers of her cybernetic are damaged. “Blake Belladonna. Right-hand woman to Adam Taurus”--the name alone makes her flinch violently, and she doesn’t miss the look Yang and Weiss exchange, even if the sentence continues unbroken--“and second-in-command aboard the _Moonslice._ ”

“Was,” Blake corrects harshly, because if there’s anything she wants control over before she dies, it’s her loyalty, and that belongs to nobody. “I _was_ all of those things. I’m not now.”

“You escaped?” 

“In a manner of speaking,” Blake says, growing more wary by the second, more aware. “I ran.”

Yang shoots Weiss another quick glance; Weiss tilts her head, spreads her palm flat and gestures out, as if to say, _fine, get on with it._ “Okay,” Yang says easily, drops the facade of distance and reverts to unusually casual. “You’ve got _quite_ the price on your head, Belladonna. Give us one good reason why we shouldn’t turn you in, and we won’t.” 

“I don’t have one,” Blake says, the exact opposite with her rigid posture, eyes bright and wild. Her stare darts to each of them in succession, fists clamped at her side. Yang’s never seen a more vivid description of the fight or flight response. “Turn me in. It’ll be better than letting him find me again.”

She’s met with silence, but it’s so _full,_ as if she’s lit a fuse somehow, struck a match and dropped it. Weiss raises one eyebrow - she seems like a woman who spends a lot of time looking at lines and reading between them - but it’s Yang who surprises her with a sudden smile, sharp and full of teeth, irises a shade of red she finds strangely alluring, rather than terrifying. 

“Okay,” Yang repeats, stepping forward. Even with her crushed, broken fingers, she exudes an air of _danger_ about her, someone who’d bring only her fists to a gun fight and win. No, not even a gun fight. A full-on war, fleets of starships shooting at hyperspeeds. “Now it’s getting interesting.” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you can find my playlist [here!](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2cpmxN2iY2dOSUXmV2AntZ?si=_B9lWWxjTCyq-a-Wf6s41g)

Somehow, a battle’s been lost.

She’s not sure how or when it even occurred; she only senses the shift of it, the subtle tilt of a ship avoiding collision with a wing. What she sees is this: Yang’s eyes that burning shade of red, too enchanting to tear herself away from. (Enchanting - stupid word. She shakes herself out of it. Intriguing. Intriguingly red - it’s normally the color of Adam’s hair and her own blood, and nothing else.) Her smile, sharper than shattered glass. And Weiss - only in her peripheral, that white hair swinging over her shoulder as she turns away, accepting the threat of her back to wolves.

“She’s your responsibility,” Weiss says, signaling a kind of surrender. “If she kills you in your sleep, that’s on you.” 

“Aw, Weiss,” Yang replies playfully without losing her edge, “do you like, _like_ me or something? Do you like, _care_ about what happens to me?” 

There’s the most miniscule of pauses, hand curling around the railing before the door. “I’ll kill you myself,” she says, but underneath her disgust, Blake finds fondness. Yang’s smile reaches a dimple, and Ruby laughs. 

Maybe they’re dating, Blake thinks idly, and immediately berates herself for even caring. She chalks it up to survival instincts - relationships can be used, spent and saved like currency. Forged and faked and stolen. And sometimes, that’s more useful than a physical weapon.

Adam taught her a lot about survival, but that’s one lesson she learned herself.

Her brain clearly hasn’t caught up to her mouth, because she finds herself bluntly asking, “Is she your girlfriend?” 

Yang’s eyebrows raise, a bit of the sweeping fire slipping from her expression; her lips twist in a way split between pitying and amused. “You’re pretty fucked up, aren’t you?” she says, but it seems to be rhetorical. Blake blinks, and only then comprehends the weight of her tongue - she must’ve slurred; her adrenaline’s wearing off. “Well, Belladonna, don’t you worry: I’m single. And for the small fee of three ninety-nine lien, I’ll even let you know if I’m emotionally available.” 

She winks. If she’s trying to put Blake at ease, she’s doing a great job; oxygen depletion combined with hexotin - the chemical normally responsible for slowing the nervous system while in stasis, allowing for less oxygen consumption - is a hell of a poison, and Yang clearly recognizes it. 

Blake feels the corner of her mouth curl. Regardless of her confusion, she can’t deny that other bounty hunters would’ve had her halfway to the inter-planetary station by now, gleefully counting their cards. “You’d better turn me in, then,” she focuses enough to drawl, which is marginally better than a slur and sounds about fifty times as flirtatious. Oh, well. “Deduct it from my bounty before you hand me over and let me know.”

She’s proud of the fact that Yang laughs - throws her head back, exposes the length of her neck, her strong jawline. “I’ll take it as a possible I.O.U.,” she says, but if anything, the response has seemed to temper her slightly, turn her oddly tender instead of emboldened. “I won’t hold you to a date you agreed to after a near-death experience.” 

“Whatever,” Blake says, finding it harder to keep upright, brain sinking into her skull. “Not like I haven’t had them before.” 

Yang steps closer again, steadies her at the elbow with her human hand. “Oh, death,” she sighs, fond as if referring to an ex-lover. “Isn’t _she_ fun to flirt with.” 

The blackness of her eyelids fluttering overtakes her right on time: she’s on the verge of asking what she’d normally never ask - pry for the personal - _your arm,_ she wants to say, _why yellow and where’d it go,_ but the words dissipate against the backs of her teeth. She slips forward and Yang’s one working arm is enough. She’s glad she doesn’t get the chance.

\--

She sleeps, apparently, for sixteen straight hours. 

“Hexotin poisoning will do that to ya,” the crew’s medic tells her kindly during her first examination after waking up. His name’s Jaune, and he’s a somewhat lanky, bumbling boy, but he’s kind to her - kinder than half her own men used to be. Kinder than Adam ever was. “Yang broke you out of there just in time,” he continues, slanting serious. “She’s got a sense for danger like that. Lucky.” 

“Is she?” Blake says pointedly. Oxygen deprivation had stopped her from asking the worse question, and she allows herself this one. The girl saved her life. It’s a healthy, natural curiosity. “Lucky?” 

He sees straight through her. “I’d call her pretty lucky, yeah,” he answers, keeping his tone purposefully casual as he measures her pupil dilation. “I think she’s honed some natural talent over the years.” 

Blake only hums vaguely in response, and allows him to finish his examination wordlessly. He gives her the all-clear, packing his equipment back into the small first-aid box he’d carried in with him, and tells her the most surprising thing yet: that she’s free to explore the ship if she wants; lunch is at twelve, dinner at eighteen-hundred hours (he shifts to old-military time with a sheepish grin - the Captain, he says, she likes us to pretend we’re efficient and organized), but that’s really all she needs to know. 

She stares at him, eyebrows raised. “That’s it?” she asks, dubious of the situation. They know who she is. “You’re not worried I’m going to hack into your ship? Or - I don’t know--” 

The latches on his case click, and he laughs at her surprise. “You’re not a _prisoner,_ ” he tells her kindly. “Besides, with the amount of work Ruby’s put into this baby, you’d need an instruction manual on how to hijack it.” 

Was, she corrects herself a little late. They know who she _was,_ and what she refuses to be any longer.

\--

“What do you want to do with her?” 

The question isn’t exactly unexpected - Weiss may be the captain, but she doesn’t make her decisions without deliberation and input. Not anymore. She’d learned early on that the only way to survive was to be a friend, not a dictator; and if anything, the position boasted the title without the power behind it, entirely by choice. 

Yang wipes the back of her hand across her forehead, sweat sticking to her skin. She drops her wrench and rag off to the side, glancing over her shoulder, ponytail swinging behind her. “Who, Blake?” she says mildly. “I mean, I’d like to do a lot of things to her--”

“Gross,” Ruby says, who Yang hadn’t seen enter the garage behind Weiss. “Thanks for that.” 

“Anytime.” 

“Seriously,” Weiss interrupts, herding them back on track - or attempting to. Ruby’s eyes are automatically drawn to Yang’s starship and the exposed mechanics of the wing; it’d sustained a bit of damage during their last encounter with a target that she’s finally getting around to patching up. “Jaune told me she’s up, and as we aren’t going to turn her in, we need to discuss what we’re actually going to do with her.”

“Does _she_ get a choice?” Yang asks pointedly, turning on her short red stool to face them, stretching her arms above her head. “Because if so, it’d probably be beneficial to have this conversation with her.” 

“She...does,” Weiss says, a little too slowly to not have an implication following it. “But I think we should head her off. Think about it.” She leans forward, as she tends to do whenever she’s passionate about something but doesn’t want to express it in her voice. “We pick up one of the top-ranking members of the White Fang - _ex_ -member, I suppose - who nearly died in her escape, signaling that whatever plan she had clearly wasn’t well-thought out to begin with. She has nowhere to go now, plenty of people looking for her...why don’t we offer her a deal?” 

“Weiss thinks she’ll be useful.” Ruby’s stepped around them, running her hands carefully over the wires, and her distraction is evident - not that her focus is necessary. Ruby’s all about picking up strays. “I think it’d be _great._ ” 

“She could help us,” Weiss says, crossing her arms, long braid caught in the crook of her elbow. “She probably knows half the people who pop up on _Big Shot_.” 

“Insider information.” Yang strokes along the curve of her jaw with her thumb. She can’t deny the appeal of the idea - it’d definitely give them an advantage over the other bounty hunters, and the ISSP doesn’t care who’s apprehending the targets as long as they’re getting them out of space. 

Something sizzles behind her, but she doesn’t give it any thought; she’d grown up with Ruby, long used to the tell-tale hum and crackle of testing technology. And it’d been a long time since she set someone on fire. Weiss, on the other hand, is waiting, face set and serious - she thinks it’s a good plan, but she won’t go forward without Yang’s approval, too.

Yang levels her with a similar intensity. “So what do you propose?” 

\--

She doesn’t leave immediately, despite being granted permission. She’s aboard a foreign ship, surrounded by people who should _technically_ want the money she’s worth more than they should care about her sob story; right now, the room she’s in feels like a safe haven. 

It kind of _looks_ like it, too; it’s taken her a minute to realize she seems to be in someone’s bedroom, as there’s a workbench in the corner littered with tools, and the bed across from hers is hastily made. So, on top of everything else, she’s now worried about imposing. 

“Stupid,” she breathes out to the silence of the room, talking to no one. 

Time to fall back on her training. Listen, smell, feel - there’s a metallic taste to the air and a weight on her bones, not heavy enough to break but enough to be noticable, and it tells her more than probably any of them realize. 

Their preference for gravitational intensity is an indication of where the clash; ships from Atlas tend to have lower gravity - they’re light their whole lives without the weight of survival on their shoulders, and they like to echo that in space. Ships from Vacuo - one of the outer colonies - have a slightly higher one, and it tends to show in their bodies; or it did, before the Equalization. Some of the new-agers don’t share the stockiness and thickness of their parents.

This crew, she realizes, clearly chose an average between them, as if they’d been turning it up in small increments week after week, adjusting someone to carrying their own head on their shoulders. It isn’t uncomfortable for her - gravity training was something they’d all learned in the White Fang, and the setting it’s on now reminds her of Vale, before the Astral Gate disaster that rendered the planet unlivable. It’s comfortable and familiar - the _before._ Before the war, before the White Fang radicalization, before the rising crime rates and the bounty hunters. 

The first thing she notices is that the crew of the _Rose_ is somehow incredibly finely-tuned despite how haphazardly they must’ve all found each other. She hadn’t been told that explicitly, but it’s obvious in the details: there’s an intercom in the room she’s in, and she occasionally hears the crew communicating back-and-forth at their convenience, course and orbit updates, navigational data, addressing targets of the day as called out by _Big Shot_ \- even inquiring about lunch. She’s working up the curiosity to explore when she catches the beginnings of a single argument between Ruby and Yang (her nerves fire, stomach doubling down on the smirk of Yang’s voice) and stops at the door, listening. 

She’s so absorbed by the playfulness of it - the whine from Ruby, the patience from Yang - they’re discussing an upgrade to one of Yang’s personal belongings, apparently, but she can’t tell what - that she’s completely caught off guard by the door whooshing open, and the girl she’s listening to standing on the other side, lips curled in advance. 

“Fine, fine,” Yang starts nonsensically, making direct eye contact. “I’ll give you free reign. How’s that sound?” 

Blake’s thrilled she’s learned the art of keeping her mouth shut over the years, or a fair amount of insinuations would be in the process of falling out of it - not to mention Ruby’s answer through the intercom makes her realize she’d entirely misconstrued the sentence.

Yang’s smile widens even further as Blake works it out, and oh, she knows _exactly_ the game she’s playing.

“ _Yes!_ ” Ruby exclaims. “ _Yang, you won’t regret it. Signing off._ ” 

There’s a trickle of beeps signaling the disconnect, and faint static penetrating silence.

“So which of you is from Atlas?” she blurts suddenly, unable to sit alone with the gleam of Yang’s eye. She’s wearing an orange tank top that sits just below her ribcage, leaves her abdominal muscles fully visible and defined, and a pair of sweats just barely loose enough to leave her thighs to the imagination, but Blake bets they’re muscular, too. The question is a cue to take it easy, and Yang senses it, relaxes her shoulders. Makes them less threatening. Her collarbone protrudes against her skin, has the crook of her neck as an alarmingly inviting place for Blake to put her mouth.

Maybe she’s still functioning at half-capacity. Or maybe she’s sustained permanent brain damage. She’d take either explanation over the potential truth. 

“You have grease,” she finally manages to say, searching for any grounding detail. “On your jaw.” 

“Oh,” Yang says, and examines her hands; they’re slightly dirty from whatever she’d been working on. She looks up again, meets Blake’s eyes - there’s insinuation there, but only if Blake wants it. “Do you mind?” 

Does she _mind?_ It’s too absurd of a question to even bother answering - Yang’s jawline is sharp and _hot,_ just like every other part of her - Blake extends a hand, catches Yang’s chin between her thumb and index, swipes the pad of it along the stain-- 

Once, when she was younger, her father had told her that in space, nothing breathes - it’s just the blackness of the void and all its magnificently burning stars calling out to you, creating the illusion of one long, drawn-out inhale. You feel the pull, he’d said. Something out there has lungs, and wants you in them. 

She hadn’t understood him at the time. Menagerie was a small planet, and most people _didn’t_ share that desire, that undeniable longing for more; all they’d wanted was a peace they’d been denied for years. A quiet life, an uninterrupted existence. 

She’d traveled to other planets before. Participating in rallies, protests, peace talks - she’d flown hundreds of times. But when she’d joined the White Fang, flown in uncharted, unplotted space for the first time, his words finally made sense. Staring out into the endless universe, no lines of ships, no regulated Astral Gates, no bustling outposts - she wondered what else was out there. What else life could offer, so far away from _this_ world, _these_ problems.

Standing here with Yang, now, her hand on Yang’s jaw - the feeling is remarkably, terrifyingly similar. 

“You probably just made it worse,” Yang jokes, breaking the sudden tension with ease; Blake drops her fingers, but swears she catches the faintest flicker of a blush on Yang’s cheeks. “Grease is like that.” 

Sure enough, she’s only managed to smear the line a little wider. She offers her own hesitant grin, only at a corner. “Yeah,” she says. “Sorry about that.” 

“Thanks for trying,” Yang says, but all she hears hiding in the undertone is _oh, at least we’re getting somewhere._

\--

Yang leads her to the common room, down a few corridors and a set of stairs, and the second thing Blake notices is that the _Rose_ is far, far too heavily modded and upgraded to be anything other than the work of a genius with too much time on their hands. Jaune's comment about hijacking starts to make sense.

Most of the crew seems to be gathered around a somewhat-old television set, wires extended, with the _Big Shot_ intro playing loudly; none of them even look at her, too focused on the target of the day. 

_“Hiya, Amigos!”_ the man opens. “ _All three-hundred thousand bounty hunters in the star system! How y’all doin’?”_

_“Get ready, cowboys and cowgirls, because this one’s a doozy!_ ” the woman trills on screen, fake-gun held in her hand, and pulls the trigger to reveal a flag of a wanted poster. Blake recognizes the man immediately. The woman’s male counterpart takes over. “ _Notorious dust thief, Roman Torchwick, has finally been spotted in New-Vale and deemed responsible for the robbery of numerous dust shops in the area.”_

_“Oooh!”_ the woman exclaims. “ _And the good news is, he’s worth a whopping eight million lien!”_

A redhead she hasn’t yet been introduced to whistles under her breath. The man on-screen continues, “ _Standard terms still apply! You must bring this fugitive in alive and undamaged!”_

The outro is short, but the shift in energy is obvious among the crowd in the room. Blake can’t blame them: eight million lien is a lot of money, and this _is_ their job - there’s no way they’ll let this one go. 

And then all eyes are on her. The attention briefly strikes her solid, fear flooding her spine - distantly, as if it’s a different her having the thought, she wonders how high her own bounty is. 

“So, Blake Belladonna,” the white-haired woman says, now facing Blake with her arms crossed, braid loose over her shoulder and scar prominent over her eye. “Know him?” 

It comes to her suddenly. “Weiss Schnee,” she says before she can stop herself, surprise taking over discretion. “ _You’re_ the one from Atlas.” 

Even Yang raises an eyebrow, and the silence becomes almost oppressive in its confusion. She clarifies, “The gravity,” but she isn’t sure it helps until Ruby laughs. 

“I _told_ you it was noticeable,” she says, apparently delighted by the fact that Blake had been able to perceive it. 

“Aw, that’s our Atlas girl,” Yang teases, resting an elbow on Weiss’s head and leaning in. “Light as a feather.” 

“That’s _enough,_ ” Weiss hisses, ducking out from underneath Yang’s arm. “I’m trying to exude a sense of _authority,_ here.” 

“Aye aye, captain.” The redheaded woman springs into a salute.

Blake decides she’ll build up credit. “I do know him,” she interrupts, circling the conversation back to where she’d derailed it. “I mean, not personally. But he’s working for the White Fang - and before you ask, no, I don’t know why they’re consorting with a human.” 

“Still,” Weiss says, taking her redirection like an outstretched hand. “That’s more information than any of the other bounty hunters know.” 

Oh, yes, that adds up perfectly. Blake isn’t stupid. She’d always known her survival was going to be conditional. “I suppose so,” she allows cautiously, waiting for the actual words to be spoken.

Strangely, Yang senses the source of her wariness and smoothly cuts in to de-escalate. It’s so intuitive Blake’s forced to consider if it’s a specialty of hers. “We meant what we said yesterday: we won't turn you in.” She says it so firmly Blake has no choice but to believe her, though she’s not sure where the instantaneous desire to trust is coming from. "We're a crew that believes in second chances. But we aren't about to just let you wander about the universe, either."

Blake takes a moment to process, and then-- "A proposition?" she asks.

"We assume you know a lot of the targets on our list, and possibly many _we_ don’t even know of yet," Weiss says. Her eyes are a steel blue, the way the moon looks reflecting waves. "If you're serious about turning over a new leaf, then start here. Help us catch them."

Every pair of eyes are resting on her, and it’s in that split second where all the revelations hit her at once, leave her with more questions than answers: Why is _Weiss Schnee,_ former heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, commandeering a hauler with a group of bounty hunters? Why have all these people - clearly from such different backgrounds and lifestyles - come together in the first place? Why did they let her live? Why, _really,_ did they decide not to turn her in? 

There’s nowhere for the questions to go except build up in her throat to be saved for a later day, and so she follows her own preset: she glances to Yang at her side, lets her gaze drop deliberately to her prosthetic and back, and asks, “Is this about more than just money?” 

She registers faint appreciation in Yang’s eyes before it quickly shifts to fire, kindling taking to spark - she thinks this is probably an apt vision of Yang’s entire personality, and she isn’t wrong. But even so, it takes a long time for Yang to respond; her metallic fingers twitch, curl into a fist and stretch again. Blake remembers their brokenness and wonders who repaired them, or who at least kept her company while she did it herself. 

“Yes,” Yang says, and her voice is deadly without the cushion of being quiet. She’s never hidden from anyone, and she won’t start now. “It’s about a hell of a lot more than money.” 


End file.
